Silent Night
by hobgoblin123
Summary: Set during their voyage home on board of the 'God's Mercy'. Listening to an ancient song changes Damien's attitude towards the Hunter. Mainly friendship with only a very faint hint of slash.


**Silent Night**

Disclaimer: I own neither the Coldfire Trilogy not the famous Christmas carol 'Silent Night', and no profit whatsoever is intended.

Warnings: none

Credits: The Parable of the Prodigal Son is from the Bible, Luke 15:11-32

A/N: I'm going to post another story of mine in the coming days, but for today, I'm afraid this will have to do as my Christmas contribution (as far as I know, the works written for 'Yuletide Treasure' are due to be revealed on AO3 tomorrow). Silvereyedbitch, Shadowy Star, Morgana, Herdcat, Sartala, Carpathian Lady and all the others out there: I wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year! Thanks so much again for reviewing, providing invaluable aid, cheering me up and just being there...

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It was a quiet night on board of the God's Mercy. A starry, icy December night seemingly made for reviewing the past year, commemorating deceased friends who had found a cold and lonely grave in foreign countries and longing for the home Vryce had never had in his adult life, a safe haven to rest his travel-weary limbs and find some human comfort in the presence of his loved ones.

But neither did true safety exist in a world drowning in terror and madness under the influence of a power-crazed Iezu, nor did a family wait for him with open arms. Due to his travels at the behest of his church, the contact with both his pagan mother and his brother Raymond had been but loose at the very best for years now, and as for his love life, it didn't even deserve the name. After the only woman he might have considered settling down with had left him for a few tribes of rakh and a vulking lynch mob had killed Rasya Maradez, he had resorted to having a one-night-stand or two while waiting for a passage across Novatlantis in order to vent his sex drive, mindless couplings lacking any emotional involvement whatsoever which had left a bad taste in his mouth after the needs of the body had been satisfied. It wasn't what he truly wanted. But with all his comrades gone but the one who was standing right at the bow now, gazing out into the night in quiet contemplation, the burden of loneliness could become crushing sometimes.

Huddling tighter into his overcoat, Damien stifled a sigh. Whether alive or undead, Gerald Tarrant was an universal genius, a brilliant scholar who had managed to create a perfectly functioning ecosystem and to breed the only true horses on Erna, just to mention a few of his achievements, but the intricacies of compassion were far beyond him. Empathy simply wasn't in the nature of a being who had been torturing and killing for centuries now without feeling a shred of pity for his victims. To make matters worse, the adept's already not exactly stellar mood hat hit rock bottom in the wake of what he was perceiving as a breach of his compact. Unlike aboard the Golden Glory, there were no animated discussions about the fundamental principles of faith of the Church of Unification or the religious history of their mother planet Earth, and slowly but surely, the lack of communication was starting to grate on Vryce's already frayed nerves.

Hence, instead of once again vainly trying to strike up a conversation with a man who wasn't in the least interested in his company, he might be better off calling it a night and going to bed, if the narrow, uncomfortable bunk in his cabin could be called a bed at all. Should the need for a friendly human voice prove overwhelming, he could always exchange a few words with the crew members having first watch in passing. If he was lucky, the ship's cook would even have a nice glass of grog ready, destined for warming up the chilled-through sailors before they could finally hit the mattress at around a quarter past midnight. They certainly deserved it after holding out in the freezing temperatures for four long hours.

Pivoting on his heels and going below deck without bothering to address his reticent enemy turned brother-in-arms would have been a natural choice under the given circumstances. A wise choice. But as if magnetically drawn to him by a force stronger than his willpower, he walked forwards without even realizing that he was moving until he reached the railing a mere arm's length away from the tall, lean frame of the Hunter.

Other than his hair and silken robes blowing in the icy night wind, Tarrant stood perfectly still, not even breathing. Owing to his impassive face so deathly pale in the moonlight and his unblinking eyes which were devoid of any human emotion whatsoever, he looked like a delicately carved but utterly inapproachable figurehead. Or like a corpse which, in a way, came much too close to the truth for Damien's liking.

He couldn't help but shuddering at the thought, and a renewed surge of depression welled up from a place deep down inside him he usually tried to keep strictly under lock and key. With Jenseny buried in what had been left of her unfortunate father's protectorate and Hesseth's bones bleaching in a ravine, this monster in the guise of a man who had told him without batting so much as an eyelash that he was intent on corrupting him to his very core and whose mere presence was eating away at the pillars of his soul more and more with each passing day was everything left to him. It was a blood-curling idea, indeed.

As he had been wont to during the months of their voyage, Gerald remained stonily silent, didn't even acknowledge his arrival with so much as a single nod of his head, and the warrior knight decided that it didn't make any sense to freeze his bum off any longer. Whatever he would find at Tarrant's side, a bit of human warmth certainly wouldn't be among it. But just when he was coming close to a strategic retreat and to hell with whatever was going on in this ingenious but twisted brain, the adept turned his head ever so slightly and shot him an impatient side-glance. "Are you finally through with bemoaning your fate, Vryce?" he snapped irritably. "If not, I'd rather you indulged in your uncalled-for fit of the blues elsewhere."

Very much against his will, Damien felt his hackles rising. "I don't know what you're complaining about," he shot back. "After all, I didn't invite you to prowl around in my brain."

The Neocount of Merentha snorted disdainfully. "Your thoughts are so loud that I can hardly help listening to them. Kindly direct them on a less maudlin topic or get you gone. I'm not in the mood for foolish human sentimentality."

"I bet you aren't, Hunter. You don't know anything about the needs of the living, heartless bastard that you are. About the comfort of a simple touch, a kind..."

"As you very well know, I wasn't always a _monster_," Tarrant rained on his parade. "I had a wife. Children. A fat lot of good it did me when I was facing death because of my heart condition and the very church I had created opened hell beneath me, threatening to condemn me outright for the 'crime' of my adeptitude! The safe haven you keep whining about in your mind is nothing but an illusion. A pipe dream for the weak."

Damien's glower was nothing short of the adept's. "Whatever you think of me, I'm not an idiot. Or have you forgotten the fate of the mother who killed her four children in order to spare them the grisly fate waiting for them? While you chose to stay on your vulking horse, I was there. I saw their cut throats. So don't you dare lecturing me on the vulnerability of life. That's something I'm not in the mood for."

"But at least she did protect them, if in the only way left to her. You might take this maternal instinct for granted, but it isn't. I learned it the hard way."

Somewhat taken aback by this unexpected confession, the priest scrutinized his ally against odds. Tarrant's angelic face was perfectly blank, as empty as the vast expanses of lightless vacuum their spacefaring forefathers had braved on their way to their new home, but there was something in his eyes that spoke of old bitterness, of wounds to his soul which even the passing of nigh to a thousand years hadn't yet fully healed.

Remembering what the Hunter had told him about his family background after they had rescued him from roasting over a fire like the main course of a cannibalistic barbecue, pity got the upper hand over the reminders of Damien's ire. "I'm sorry to hear this," he muttered. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"What for? Suffice to say that my mother valued her own well-being more than mine. Instead of coming to my aid when I was needing her most, she closed her eyes and ears to the physical abuse at the hands of my father and the perverse cruelty of my brothers. It must have been hard for her. After all, I screamed loud enough to be heard even in the servants' quarters. Not that they ever dared to intervene on my behalf, at least not openly."

The adept's voice was calm and controlled as if he were talking about the fate of a complete stranger, but Damien didn't fail to register that his hands were clutching the railing like a lifeline. "I don't know why I've told you this," Tarrant continued after a while with a small, self-deprecatory laugh. "It's you and your damned influence, Vryce. You not only tempted me into breaking the compact that sustains me but also somehow reawakened memories and even emotions I had deemed forever dead and buried since the night I killed my family. I don't appreciate it, don't appreciate it at all."

"There's nothing wrong about remembering, Gerald. Or about feeling. It's part of your human soul."

"Just so. Which, of course, proves my point. While you wasted your time in Mercia with the pleasures of the flesh, I tried to define myself anew. Tried to cleanse myself of the taint of your humanity in an ocean of blood and fear. With regard to the fact that I haven't been brought to justice yet, it is to be hoped that I sufficiently pleased the power I serve to earn its forgiveness. But one more, however minor, transgression...

Tarrant trailed off, and the warrior knight thought he could see his shoulders tremble ever so slightly. Inwardly cursing his helplessness, he opened his mouth for whatever comforting remark his mind would come up with eventually, but before he could bring forth a single word, an untrained voice high above them started to sing.

It was a solemn tune the sailor in the crow's nest was intoning, simple but touching and somehow strangely familiar. The Hunter's delicate nostrils flared as if he could scent the notes in the air, and an eerie light appeared in his silver eyes. "How very peculiar," he whispered. "Do you know what day it is? The date is December 24, Vryce, Christmas Eve for a large part of the population on Earth. If there are still humans living on what they were wont to call the 'Blue Planet' and religious customs haven't changed fundamentally, the Christians are celebrating the birth of their saviour tonight."

Although the Church of Unification had been forced to abandon the belief in angels, saints and a messiah long ago, a clergyman as high up on the food chain as Damien was well versed in the origins of their faith. But be that as it may, he couldn't quite fathom why the ditty the mariner was singing to kill time was making such an impression on his companion. "Of course I know the meaning of Christmas," he said with a frown. "I've even heard the song before. It celebrates the coming of brighter days after the winter solstice and the continuing of nature's cycle. What the hell is so special about it?"

"What's so special about it?" The Neocount raised a disapproving eyebrow. "You don't understand, Vryce. I was born in the year 264 after the landing, at a time when the religious authorities hadn't yet managed to eradicate the last traces of the old faith. What we're hearing now is just a pale copy of a carol still very popular in the north in my younger days. The original text was written on our mother planet hundreds of years before mankind could even think of sending a sleeper ship into deep space. Written by a man like you. A priest of the One God."

"And do you still know the verses?"

"That goes without saying. Silent night, holy night, All is calm, all is bright, Round young virgin mother and child..."

During his travels, Damien had seen many a strange and wondrous thing, but witnessing the Hunter of all people not just quoting but softly singing the words which had already been ancient when their forefathers had boarded the ship destined to carry them across space and time certainly would get top billing on his list of the peculiarities he had been encountering so far. For a moment, a surge of religious abhorrence as fresh as on the day he had first learned about the true identity of the creature called the Darkest Prince of Hell with good reason took his breath away, and he balled his hands into fists. A man who hadn't shied away from bartering his humanity to the forces of the dark in order to gain relative immortality, not to mention the atrocities he had been committing since his subsequent transformation into a vampiric demon, surely had no right to utter the glad tidings of the birth of Christ.

But yet, listening to Tarrant somehow struck a chord with him. With his hair framing his finely-chiselled face like a halo and his eyes sparkling brighter than the stars above, the adept rather resembled one of God's angels than the fiend he truly was, and Vryce suddenly remembered that he was beholding the very same being who had written more than half of their bible before his fall into darkness and thus built the pillars of their faith. The Prophet of the Law and premier knight of his Order.

In a blink, his entire perception changed. Religious customs might have been modified since the colonists' arrival on Erna, but the core of their beliefs hadn't. 'The nature of the One God is Mercy, and His Word is forgiveness' (WTNF, p. 353) the founder father of the Church of Unification had taught in an era long gone from living memory, and who was he to question him? Redemption from all evil couldn't be solely for the just who would earn a place in the Kingdom of Heaven, anyway. Wasn't it said in one of the few scriptures surviving the Great Sacrifice that the father of the Prodigal Son had slaughtered a fattened calf to celebrate his return, a deed severely criticized by his younger child?

There was no denying that Gerald had done worse than squandering his inheritance on drink and whores. He had plunged from great height into a fathomless abyss, had thrown everything away in a deed so vile that it defied description, but with regard to what he had just disclosed about his childhood, it didn't come as quite a surprise that a boy who had never learned to trust had grown into a man opting for a last desperate act of liberation instead of simply coming to terms with his looming premature death.

The abused child suffering unspeakable agonies at the end of the dark ages couldn't be helped anymore, but his immortal soul was an altogether different kettle of fish. Trapped in a lifeless body utterly alien to the human plane which was condemned to roam the night in order to satisfy the eternal hunger after the vital energy of the living it might be, but it wasn't beyond saving. Try as he might to gainsay it, there was still good inside the former prophet of his faith, or he would have never been driven to sheer despair when his God had rejected him.

As for himself, in allying with the Hunter he had betrayed everything his faith was standing for. But he was still a Knight of King Gannon's Order of the Golden Flame and a priest, and as the latter, his primary duty was providing spiritual care not only to the just but also to the fallen instead of condemning them to hell. What Tarrant had so callously called the 'pursuit of a hobby' (BSR, p.146) in the dae in Briand was and would always be anathema to him. Sugarcoating the bitter truth would be nothing short of an insult to all those innocent women the Lord of the Forest had hunted down and killed like wild animals in his domain. But this was only a part of him, the lesser part. There was so much about Gerald that deserved saving, and from now on, he would take the ancient words celebrating the dawn of God's redeeming grace to heart and do everything in his power to bring this lost sheep back into the fold, even at the cost of his own life.

"You're a fool, Vryce," the adept whispered. "A courageous, well-meaning fool, but a fool, nonetheless. There is no way back for me. I've already told you why I can't honestly repent the choices I made so many years ago."

His face rigid as a death mask, Tarrant kept his eyes firmly locked on the glittering water surface, but Damien knew him well enough to recognize the tension in his strong shoulders as a sign of utmost agitation. His heart ached for the man fighting a lonely battle at his side, and he placed his sword hand over the long, pale fingers still clenched tight around the railing without bothering about the possible consequences of his action. Even though the Hunter flinched at his touch, he didn't shrug him off as he had half expected, a rather telling indication of his emotional turmoil, as far as Vryce was concerned.

The cold of the grave radiating from the undead flesh beneath his hand was threatening to freeze the marrow in his bones, but he wouldn't have let go for the life of him. Touching Gerald felt so good, so very _right_ in an inexplicable way that for a fleeting second he wished he could pull him in his arms and hold him tight until the first gleam of dawn would banish his night-bound companion to the lightless hold deep down in the bowels of the ship. But acting on such an inane impulse was simply out of the question. Only the God of their faith knew what the adept would do if he ever dared to put the strange ideas crossing his mind in unguarded moments with increasing frequency lately into practice. The only thing he could do for Tarrant under the given circumstances was being there for him, a friend in need, and devoting his life to kindling the tiny spark of humanity still left in him into a blazing flame. Everything else was in the Lord's hands.

"You never know what the future holds, Gerald," the warrior knight said gently when he could force something past the lump in his throat at long last. "I once vowed to kill you, but yet here I am, praying for your salvation. And for your vulking survival, as strange as it might seem. This isn't about you being a handy tool. Or about setting evil against evil in the hope that they might destroy each other, for that matter. Even if I didn't need your help with thwarting Calesta's plans, I wouldn't want you to die anymore. Frankly, my life would be rather boring if you weren't there anymore to annoy the hell out of me at least once a day."

The Hunter didn't answer, but Damien thought he could see the corners of his mouth twitching ever so slightly. At the very next moment, a slender hand let go of the railing just to come to rest on the back of his own as light as a feather, and in this place and time, it was enough.


End file.
